


heart and soul of a poet

by frafeyrac



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Child Abuse, Child Death, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, M/M, One sided, Past Abuse, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Suicide Attempt, Triggers, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-01
Updated: 2013-08-01
Packaged: 2017-12-22 02:56:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/908075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frafeyrac/pseuds/frafeyrac
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><div class="center">
  <p>He tells himself he will not cry.</p>
  <p>He is not so different from the horse his father scared, wild and terrified.</p>
  <p>He no longer wants to be a Prouvaire.</p>
</div>
            </blockquote>





	heart and soul of a poet

Jehan’s parents don’t even tell him his aunt has died in person, they send him a letter that arrives three days late and tells him they’re sending a car to get him so he can come home for the funeral. Jehan gets the letter when he’s with Joly and Courfeyrac and he bites his lip and doesn’t let himself cry in front of them. He waits until he’s back in his room when he sobs, clutching the letter to his chest and rocking backwards and forth on his bed. He doesn’t want to go home, not to the big house in Provence. He hasn’t had a home there since he was seven years old and his parents sent him to boarding school. He can’t even remember what his bed in that house feels like, or what colour the front door is.  
He thinks of his aunt, the one constant in his life. He stayed with her, over Christmas and the summer and the half terms where his parents didn’t make him stay at school. She was the mother he’d always wanted, understanding and quiet and she didn’t ever raise her voice to him the way his mother and his father did. She had been the one who taught him how to water and clip her plants so they’d grow stronger and faster. Jehan always thought of her lavender which she grew in a pot on her windowsill, and in her bedroom, and in every flower bed of her garden. His happiest memories all take place in his aunt’s seaside cottage with her old dog and the sand between his toes.

The car arrives exactly when his parents say, and it’s a hired car to pick him up. He has a bag with some of his clothes and his notebook but he doesn’t have much here or at home, it’s a long drive and the chauffer doesn’t speak to him once. He stares out the window, the city blurring into the green fields of the countryside. He has a long journey and he doesn’t remember falling asleep but when he wakes up it’s starting to get dark and he vaguely remembers this part of the country. There’s a tree lined driveway and a large house but it could belong to anyone. 

There’s no greeting when he knocks on the door, bag in hand. It swings open to a grand hallway with a staircase. He wants his mother to run up to him and hug him and tell him it wasn’t his fault, nothing was ever his fault and his father to smile at him and tell him about his latest trip to some lavish country where he dined with the president and the prince but he doesn’t, they don’t. His parents grew cold and distant to him seven years ago. He thinks of Enjolras and how he complains of his mother and father yet finds himself wishing he had parents who cared enough to reprimand him or scold him or even acknowledge his presence. 

He doesn’t recognise this big house or the way to his room. He doesn’t know what way to go but he assumes it must be up the stairs and he finds himself trailing his hands down corridors of carved wood decorated with expensive paintings he stops to marvel at. He’s so lost in the place he should call home, but this house hasn’t been a home to him since he was packed off to boarding school. There’s a family portrait at the bottom of the hall, and his fingers trace over the boy with the mouse brown hair and his father’s hand on his shoulder. Even in the family paintings he’s cast out to the side so his brother can take the spotlight. His brother who had been kind to him when his parents had not, who had made him feel important for being the second-son and saved him food from meals he missed when he’d been sent to his bedroom. He can’t look at the painting for much longer, the frozen expressions of a fake family are starting to unnerve him. He turns a corner and finds himself back in front of the staircase and his eyes water because he’s so hopelessly lost. 

His father decides to take him to his aunt’s house to clear out his things from the spare bedroom. He doesn’t speak to him and they sit in silence. There’s no asking how the school year is going or how he’s feeling or even if he’s okay with revisiting his aunt’s house. He can smell the sea through the vents in the car and it makes him smile, last summer she’d taught him how to paint the sea foam on the waves and they’d sat outside painting until the sun set and it was too dark to see the waves where they crashed onto the sand.  
His aunt had understood him in a way his parents hadn’t, she had the same heart and soul of a poet. There was a horse walking along the road side, and his father revs the engine when he has to slow down. The horse spooks, dancing into the middle of the road and his father revs again, sending the horse skittering closer to the car. The rider is trying to bring him back round to the side of the road, but another rev sends him up into the air and the hooves clatter on the tarmac as he lands and his father revs again.

“Stop!” Jehan doesn’t mean to shout, but his hand is over his mouth as the horse rears higher. His eyes are rolling and there’s a wild look of terror about him. His father just laughs, makes a comment about how horses don’t belong on the road and this time presses his horn. The horse rears so high Jehan thinks he’ll flip backwards and crush the girl on his back. “Stop father, you’re scaring him!” He screams and grabs at the man next to him to try. His father throws him off, and the back of his hand slaps hard against his cheek. His eyes water and his cheek glows red, he can’t even look at the man he calls father because he’s never felt like a name has never fit a person so badly. He won’t let him see him cry.

His actions were able to give the horse and his rider time to compose themselves, and she raises her middle finger as they drive by. Jehan looks at the horse through the wing mirror and the sweat on his neck and his heaving flanks and he thinks they are much the same, wild and terrified.

His mother hears what happened and she sends him to his room without any dinner, the way she used to years ago. This time his brother isn’t there to smuggle in a chicken drumstick or a slice of ham and some crumbling biscuits that no one was going to miss and he can feel the soft pains of hunger and tries his best to ignore them s he wraps himself up in starchy white sheets. This bed is so foreign, this room could belong to anyone. He tells himself he can’t cry because then mother will hear him and scold him or father will smack him and tell him to grow up. He thinks of his aunt and how she used to wipe away his tears when he cut his knee or when he watched a sad film, he thinks of how he never cried when he was with his aunt because he never needed to and it makes his stomach drop and he turns in his bed. He thinks of his brother who laughed and never lost his temper or cried out and who he worshiped as the person who he wanted to be. He thinks of the time his brother tried to teach him how to swim in the lake, and he feels numb.

They bring his aunt’s body home but he’s not allowed to see her. She lies in a coffin in the same room his brother lay in and there are mourners and people who she barely knew that visit her but her nephew is told to stay out of sight upstairs. He’s told that it’ll upset him but he knows it’s really because his parents want to forget about him. He stays silent, not speaking or eating or leaving his room and no one cares. He drops his pen down the side of his bed when he writes in his notebook one afternoon, and reaches under his bed only to feel his fingers wrap round something hard and flat and he pulls it up. It’s a hairbrush, one side painted with toy trains and teddy bears. Through the dust he can see mousy brown hairs caught around the bristles and he hugs it to his chest but he will not cry.

His mother decides he’s getting his hair cut without telling him, and she takes him to an upmarket part of Nice under the lure of getting a meal. She doesn’t speak much and doesn’t notice when he pushes his meal round his plate and doesn’t ask him how he feels. Jehan doesn’t feel anything anymore, he does not cry. He is numb.  
She takes him for a walk after the meal, before mentioning how unkempt his nails are and taking him into a salon. She’s planned this and sits him down and it’s only when she talks to the woman at the reception and someone who looks like a stylist that he realises she’s planned to bring him here. He tries to hide his hair, to conceal it under his palms but it’s too long. His aunt had let him grow it when he asked if he could have hair as long as hers that he could tie up and twist lavender and buttercups into and she had taught him how to plait with his fingers but by the time he was half way through the school year he’d forgotten and Grantaire had wound his fingers through his hair and showed him how he would plait his sisters. 

“Jean, come.” His mother calls and he shakes his head. Her heels click on the tiles and she grabs his arm, pulling his hands away from his hair. Her nails dig into the flesh of his arm and he fights her as she tries to pull him over. He kicks and uses his free hand to try and uncurl her nails and he screams.

“No!” He shrieks, and he isn’t thinking when he bites her hand. It’s not hard, her nails have cut the skin on his arm and his bite is just some fading red lines. She smacks him hard across the cheek, and he gives up. They seat him in the chair and he will not cry when the scissors cut through thick locks of his hair and they fall to the ground. He will not cry when he looks in the mirror and he no longer sees himself. He will not cry when he feels the razor on his neck and his mother smiles in approval.

He doesn’t speak for the rest of the day, his hands shake and his cheek is red and hot. His mother sends him to his room with no dinner and he feels numb. He moves his hand to brush it through his hair, but there’s nothing there and he screams, but there is no noise. He howls silently, kicking his feet against the mattress and his fingernails scratching at his skin. He hides his marks on his hips and his thighs but his nails rake over the skin of his forearms and he screams silently, his body convulsing and he does not cry.

He finds scissors, and he takes handfuls of what’s left of his hair and he cuts. He cuts blindly, snipping what sticks out from his fists and he will not cry. He will not cry and he will not scream. He thinks of his brother as he cuts and the hair falls around him on the floor and he tells himself over and over, he will not cry. He thinks of the horse on the road, wild and terrified and in that moment he is the horse that throws his feet into the air without knowing if he’ll come back down. He is a rogue, untamed and unbroken. 

His mother scolds him when she sees him, and her hands pull and tug at what’s left of his hair and she slaps him again. She bans him from his aunts funeral, and he screams at her to let him go, screams that it’s not right strangers who spoke to her once can visit her. He screams that it was his fault she died, screams that he will kill his mother. He screams and he stops making sense, his lungs burn but he will not cry. His mother says nothing, watching him with tight lips. He screams about his brother and his voice breaks. He screams that it was his fault, and his mother raises her hand and he stops out of fear of another slap.

“You’re right Jean, it was your fault.” She shouts, and he quivers where he sits. “It was your fault he drowned in the lake.” Her voice is cold, quiet.

“You wish he’d never saved me, you wish I’d died instead of him.” He’s hysterical, but he will not cry. He will not cry in front of her.

“Yes.” It’s the word that cuts him in half, that silences the sob growing in his throat and he clasps a hand over his mouth. He cannot be in the same room as her, and he runs but he will not cry. 

He wakes on the morning of his aunt’s funeral with red lines on his thighs and his lacerations on his wrists and no one notices. There is no goodbye when he leaves and there is no car to take him back to the school. There is no one who cares for him at home and he leaves a different person than when he arrived. His mother gave him money for the train that morning and sent him out. She ignored him when he asked for an order of service. The train journey is long and he sits by the window, his notebook across his lap. He pulls his sleeves over his hands and the fields blur into purples and greens before his eyes. He thinks of his aunt and her lavender and the gulls that cry each morning that he’ll never see again. He thinks of his brother who taught him how to swim in the lake and smuggled him dinner. He thinks of the day on the lake when he’d tried to show his parents how well he could swim, but he swum too far and tired and began to drown. He thinks of how his brother dived to save him and drowned when his foot had caught on some of the weeds in the shallows. He thinks of the time his aunt told him when she died she wanted there to be flowers and colours at her funeral, and he thinks of the dark dress his mother wore. 

There’s a quiet when he returns to school. He’s back early and Courfeyrac lets out a gasp when he sees the soft strawberry blond waves that float around his shoulders are gone, and his hair is now uneven and rough. Joly hugs him and swallows any words he wants to say about how tiny he feels and the dark smudges under his eyes. Feuilly can’t say anything, too surprised to find words. Jehan feels like he’s loved for the first time in a week, and he tells himself he will not cry.  
He goes to his garden on his second day back, his tiny plot of flowers given to him by the groundsman after he offered to help him two years ago with his strawberries. He grows strawberries for the groundsman and he has jasmine and lilacs he grew so he could twist them into his hair. He has one lavender plant, and it’s sweet and fragrant and from his aunts garden. He can’t smell his lavender, and falls to his knees when he realises it’s died. He tells himself he will not cry.

He takes pills from Joly and pills from Grantaire and he’s not sure what they do apart from that they say they’re not to be mixed with alcohol so he takes the vodka Combeferre hides in the bookcase too. He skips his classes that day, his fingers unable to write what his head wants to so he ends up writing a poem and it’s beautiful. He thinks of his aunt and her house in Provence and his brother and the lake and he tells himself he will not cry. He stays in his room apart from when Matron knocks and he tells her he’s still not feeling well and she sympathises and lets him have the day off. 

He has more red lines on his arms now and he’s started taking Courfeyrac’s clothes so the sleeves of his hoodies and shirts hang over his fingertips and swamp him. When he finally is happy with everything, when he’s laid out and labelled all his possessions he tells himself he will not cry as he drinks and there’s someone crashing around upstairs. He looks up and hears someone swear loudly and another thump and then Matron yells about the little ones. He can hear more swearing and then there’s a thunder of footsteps and a hammering on his door and it’s too much in his head. He curses himself for not asking that the lock on his door is fixed and Courfeyrac bursts through and he’s red eyed and there are tear tracks down his cheeks. 

Jehan tells himself he won’t cry, but he breaks.

**Author's Note:**

> This is related to [Bubbles](http://archiveofourown.org/works/878747/chapters/1689916), but it's minor and you don't have to have read it to understand.
> 
> I love Jehan with all my heart and this was agony to write but I needed to write something that left me reeling to kick myself into gear. I've been lagging behind with Bubbles and don't feel like I'm able to actually write anything of substance or worthwhile at the minute and hate myself for it. I have no idea what inspired me other than that I've been going through a rough time myself recently and I guess these things are a good way of escaping from reality and getting your thoughts out without it being direct and hard to explain.


End file.
